Interview with Matt Dillon

Return of the Barfly

Matt Dillon loves to read and has worked with some great writers, from
Barry Gifford to William S. Burroughs. But he never thought he'd play
one of his favorites, Charles Bukowski.

More realistically, "he's a guy I'd like to get drunk with," Dillon
said when he visited San Francisco for last spring's International Film
Festival.

It helped, though, that Dillon would not actually play Bukowski, but
rather his fictitious alias, Hank Chinaski. The character comes from
Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, adapted into a new movie opening
this week in Bay Area theaters.

Dillon had never met the real Bukowski, who died in 1994, but had
read all his novels and short stories while in his twenties. "I just
never read the poetry," he says. "I had no interest in poetry at that
time in my life. So it was interesting to revisit Bukowski when I was
doing the film. I started to see things in a different way. At 40, you
start to see the vulnerability. The poetry is really beautiful. It's not
his favorite word, but it's beautiful."

The actor went to Bukowski's widow, Linda, to get her blessing and
ask for advice. "I was trying to get insight into the way he dressed.
She said clothes were totally uninteresting to him; just make sure
there's a pocket to put pencils in."

The most important thing Dillon learned was that the famous writer
was actually a very neat person, as opposed to the slob he could be
portrayed as. "It bothered him," Dillon says. "That gave me a window
into a certain kind of dignity."

One of the themes in Factotum comes from a Bukowski poem, "Roll the
Dice." It's the notion that to really be a writer, one must be ready to
sacrifice everything. Dillon says he felt this most deeply when he
embarked on his 2003 directorial debut, the underappreciated City of
Ghosts, co-starring James Caan and Natascha McElhone.

Last year, when Crash became a success and Dillon earned his very
first Oscar nomination, people began asking him where he had been for so
long. "You're spending hours and days and days working on something, and
then all of a sudden you turn around and you've committed years to it,"
he says.

But Dillon seems unruffled by such things. He describes Bukowski as a
comedian who saw the funny side of life, and even when things were at
their worst, there's always a wink. Unlike his hero, however, Dillon
takes a different view: "I'm not a laugher. I have a sense of humor, but
I don't laugh. I'm amused by people."